Adorne had no assistant. His children were too good for the trade, he said. School for them. So the stall was empty.
She wasn’t tall enough to peer over the crowd, and here in Alt Coulumb she couldn’t fly. A wooden crate lay abandoned by the girls’ stall. Tara climbed the crate and, teetering, scanned the market.
At the crowd’s edge she saw Adorne’s broad shoulders, and tall, gaunt Capistano like an ill-made scarecrow. Other stall-keepers, too, watched—no, listened. Crier’s orange flashed on the dais.
Adorne remained in place as Tara fought toward him. Not that this was unusual: the man was so big he needed more cause to move than other people. The world was something that happened to black-bearded Matthew Adorne, and when it was done happening, he remained.
But no one else had moved either.
“What’s happened?” Tara asked Adorne. Even on tiptoe, she could barely see the Crier, a middle-aged, round-faced woman wearing an orange jacket and a brown hat, an orange press pass protruding from the band. Tara’s words climbed the mounds of Adorne’s arms and the swells of his shoulders until they reached his ears, which twitched. He peered down at her through layers of cheek and beard—raised one tree-branch finger to his lips.
“Encore’s coming.”
Which shut Tara up fast. Criers sang the dawn song once for free, and a second time only if the first yielded sufficient tips. An encore meant big news.
The Crier was an alto with good carry, little vibrato, strong belt. One thing Tara had to say for the archaic process of Alt Coulumbite news delivery: in the last year she’d become a much better music critic.
Still, by now a newspaper would have given her a headline reason for the fuss.
The song of Gavriel Jones, the Crier sang.
Tells of a New Presence in our Skies.
Oh, Tara thought.
Hot Town nights burn silver
And Stone Men soar in the sky
Pray to the moon, dreams say
And they’ll spread their wings to fly.
A tale’s but a tale ’til it’s seen
And rumors do tend to spin
I saw them myself in the Hot Town last night
Though telling, I know I sin.
Tara listened with half an ear to the rest of the verse and watched the crowd. Heads shook. Lips turned down. Arms crossed. Matthew Adorne tapped his thick fingers against his thicker biceps.
Seril’s children were playing vigilante. A Crier had seen them.
The song rolled on, to tell of gargoyles returned to Alt Coulumb not to raid, as they had many times since their Lady died in the God Wars, but to remain and rebuild the cult of their slain goddess, Seril of the moon, whom Alt Coulumb’s people called traitor, murderer, thief.
Tara knew better: Seril never died. Her children were not traitors. They were soldiers, killers sometimes in self-defense and extremity, but never murderers or thieves. To the Crier’s credit, she claimed none of these things, but neither did she correct popular misconceptions.
The city knew.
How would they respond?
There was no Craft to read minds without breaking them, no magic to hear another’s thoughts without consent. Consciousness was a strange small structure, fragile as a rabbit’s spine, and it broke if gripped too tightly. But there were more prosaic tricks to reading men and women—and the Hidden Schools that taught Tara to raise the dead and send them shambling to do her bidding, to stop her enemies’ hearts and whisper through their nightmares, to fly and call lightning and steal a likely witness’s face, to summon demons and execute contracts and bill in tenths of an hour, also taught her such prosaic tricks to complement true sorcery.
The crowd teetered between fear and rage. They whispered: the sound of rain, and of thunder far away.
“Bad,” Matthew Adorne said in as soft a voice as he could make his. “Stone Men in the city. You help the priests, don’t you?”
Tara didn’t remember the last time she heard Matthew Adorne ask a question.
“I do,” Tara said.
“They should do something.”
“I’ll ask.”
“Could be one of yours,” he said, knowing enough to say “Craftsman” but not wanting, Tara thought, to admit that a woman he knew, a faithful customer, no less, belonged to that suspect class. “Scheming. Bringing dead things back.”
“I don’t think so.”
“The Blacksuits will get them,” Adorne said. “And Justice, too.”
“Maybe,” she said. “Excuse me, Matt. I have work.”
So much for breakfast.
4
One does not need an expensive Hidden Schools degree to know the first step in crisis management: get ahead of the story. If that’s impossible, at least draw even with it. Tara, who had an expensive Hidden Schools degree, hunted Gavriel Jones.
The Crier’s Guild was more hive than office. Stringers, singers, and reporters buzzed like orange bees from desk to desk, alighting coffee mugs in hand to bother others working, or pollinate them with news.
“Late report by nightmare telegraph, lower trading on Shining Empire indices—”
“You hear the Suits busted Johnny Goodnight down by the docks, taking in a shipment?”